I am not a big fan of political correctness. That is not to say that I go out of my way to be deliberately obnoxious or offensive, I just don’t see the need to twist myself into a pretzel just because the current social climate does not put any weight on personal responsibility for ones own feelings or reactions.

I respect you have an opinion, in fact I will fight for your right to express that opinion whether I agree with it or not. I would hope the feeling is reciprocated. But if you don’t like my stuff, fair enough, I am not going to cry when you don’t read it.

Now we have that out of the way, let’s chat about what being overly PC will do to your brand/online persona/uniqueness when participating in social media, and in fact any business at all.

Attempting to please all of the people all of the time (which PC tries to do) has long been known as a path to hell.  Along that path you will find yourself slowly shedding the things about you that make you, you. Like your opinions, your feelings and even logical thoughts about a particular subject you know a fair bit about.

Can you see how that will leech the colour from your personality? How in the end you will become an uninteresting shade of gray, saying the same things as everyone else?

What is often forgotten about the internet is, is that it is big. That there are hundreds of millions of people milling around online looking for answers to their questions. This pool of people is MUCH larger than the circle of friends you interact with on a daily basis offline. That means there are millions of people who already agree with YOU, and if you are not being yourself they are not going to find you, spread your word, or find you remotely interesting.

There is no real need to go to extremes to ensure you are known for something. Ditch the chicken costume now and just ensure that one part of you is shining out brighter than others. <span> </span>In the women’s world online I have seen various personality traits being leveraged. “Niceness” “Toughness” and “Humour” are some I can name names to straight away (and I bet you can too)

I would rather be disliked for being me; at least there is some real basis there for an opinion.

~Allison~